PESTEL factors affecting email marketing

In the recent past, lot of people have been talking about the factors affecting email deliverability and best practices for your emails to land in the inbox. But, baring the internal factors, much has not been discussed about the external factors that could affect email marketing.

Well, many queries arise when we talk about external factors. What are the key political factors that can affect email marketing? How can technological novelties make a difference? How can changing laws make an impact on email marketing?

So, let’s get back to our marketing books to understand the PESTEL factors and how can they affect email marketing.

1. Political Factors – Politics is a topic of discussion among every age group in almost every country now. Different political parties have different agendas like tax reforms or fresh laws in order to come to throne. These agendas create a lot of difference to the working of a business and their marketing strategy.

So, if a new Government introduces a law that limits a consumer to acquire a product or service based on his age limit or any modification in the tax policy, this will have a direct impact on the email marketing strategy. A tax reform may influence the cost of email marketing tools which ultimately will affect the overall cost of an email marketing campaign for an example.

2. Economic Factors – Every business is a lot dependent on national and international economy, based on which they allocate their marketing budgets. Circumstances fluctuate from country to country and companies need to adjust accordingly.

Let’s take an example of ‘payday poverty’. Your audience typically will look for deals in the second half of the month because most of the EMIs and other fixed expenses are compensated on the payday or a week within. So, if you are the owner of a restaurant, you’d prefer to offer deals or discounts in the second half of the month in order to experience an improved click through rate.

3. Social Factors – Human being tends to get influenced by people and things around them. So, if something is trending today, it might go out of trend in a flash. Keep yourself updated with the latest email marketing trends or you’ll lag behind the time.

Videos in email used to be a disaster a while back. But, as and when the marketers felt the need of innovation in their email marketing campaigns, its wide acceptance is clearly visible. Videos in email are now commonly used by email marketers, and various substitute for videos are advised by marketers for devices that don’t support html5.

4. Technological Factors – Well, technology has reached a stage where it is difficult to survive for an individual. Mobiles, wearables, televisions, and cars have already gone smart, and with internet things coming into the picture, email marketing gets affected terribly by technological advancements.

Around 50% of the emails are now viewed on mobile phones which has triggered the need of responsive email design for email marketers. Furthermore, wearable displays the plain text version of an email as they do not support the html. This has given a boost to mime multi-part message that consists both html and plain text version of an email.

5. Environmental Factors – Imagine you shoot an email campaign to promote your winter wear products. But, Alas! Global warming has changed the dynamics of nature and there are no signs of winter yet. Well, this can lead to a big time failure of your email campaigns.

Furthermore, in case of natural disasters like; an earthquake or a hurricane, communication failures and poor internet connections come into existence. This can severely affect the inbox placements and ultimately the ROI of your email campaigns.

6. Legal Factors – Nobody likes to get in trouble with the law, not even your emails. Every country has its own set of laws when it comes to curb the spamming. While US has implemented CANSPAM law, Australia has defined its own spam law called ACMA.

Well, these legal factors affect the email deliverability of a campaign. Consider following the best practices including list hygiene, shunning shared IPs, being compliant with Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM).